Features » May 14, 2008

Winning the White Working Class

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FORT WAYNE, IND.—Tom Lewandowski, a former General Electric factory worker, heads the central labor union council in this northeastern Indiana city of a quarter million people. Once an industrial powerhouse, Fort Wayne is still a manufacturing center despite decades of plant closings that have often been due to jobs being moved overseas.

Although socialists were powerful in local politics here before World War I, the town is now a Republican stronghold – even among many blue-collar workers – in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1964. Fort Wayne, says Lewandowski, his wide grin flashing, is “a red stain on the red state.”

As a labor leader, Lewandowski remained neutral in the Indiana primary, which Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) narrowly won, but he personally supported Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) (after his first choice, John Edwards, dropped out of the race). Obama’s “organizer mindset” appealed to Lewandowski, who has been building a working-class community affiliate of the labor movement. Obama’s March 18 Philadelphia speech on race in America further impressed him.

Now Lewandowski wants Obama to take another big step, one that could strengthen Obama’s appeal among white working-class voters who have gravitated more toward Clinton, as they did again in Indiana and North Carolina.

“Like what he did with his Philadelphia speech on race, he needs a speech on class,” Lewandowski says. “But, of course, we don’t have class in America.”

Obama would do well to take Lewandowski’s advice. Despite Obama’s denunciation of the power of special interests and his increasing references on the campaign trail to trade and jobs, he has not been as eloquent a champion of workers as he has been of general political reform.

Before the April and early May primaries, cultural and racial politics seemed to throw the Obama campaign off its stride, especially as the controversy over Obama’s former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, smoldered, then flared again. It angered Don Lutes, a retired steelworker and union official from Griffith, Ind., who voted early for Clinton.

“All this came out with the Rev. Wright and this [former Weatherman] Bill Ayers deal,” Lutes says. “I can’t believe he knew this Ayers. They bombed the Capitol. How could he associate with people like that? That really turned me off. And [Obama’s] wife says this is the first time she felt proud of being an American. That’s what Rev. Wright teaches.”

Lutes says he knew many former steelworkers felt the same way, some claiming they would vote for McCain rather than Obama. But Lutes says that regardless of the candidate in the fall, he will be “sticking with the Democrats. Our country is down so much.”

On April 30, the day after Obama repudiated Wright, Lutes called back. “[Obama] cleared up a lot by denouncing his minister,” Lutes said. “That helped a lot. If I’d known that he’d denounce the reverend, I would have voted for him.” But he worries it will be an uphill battle, as he hears local Republicans plan to exploit the controversies in the general election and hears “constantly” that “a lot of white people will not vote for a black person.”

Yet Obama may be able to make it through this racial and cultural minefield. Just as he has tried to explore the nation’s racial history candidly, he needs to make his campaign a crusade to overcome economic inequality and class divisions.

Even when losing to Clinton, Obama has polled respectably in most states among working-class white Democrats (running, it should be noted, against another Democrat, not conservative Republican McCain). And if he is nominated, he can win independents and most of those Clinton supporters – especially her disproportionate share of working-class women who are strongly pro-Democratic.

If economic issues continue to dominate voters’ minds, Democrats should be able to portray McCain as a continuation of both President Bush’s policies and a badly functioning economy. And despite some real working-class conservatism, there’s also strong evidence that a deep reservoir of support exists among working-class voters for progressive economic policy – if Democrats can tap it.

Obama may have been off target in his analysis when he talked about working-class voters clinging to religion, guns, anti-abortion views and criticism of trade out of longtime frustration. But he was right that many Americans are bitter and angry.

Bitterness on the street

After the Zollner Piston auto-parts plant in Fort Wayne slashed employment and moved production overseas, Rich Schweyer, 38, retrained from auto-parts producer to a paralegal – and now makes half of what he did as a factory worker.

“There’s one message I tried to get across to the Obama campaign,” says Schweyer. “They keep talking about casualties from Iraq as forgotten soldiers. I consider myself a casualty, part of the forgotten middle class. I think a prop for society is a strong middle class, and it’s gone.”

He adds: “I understand what Obama was talking about, when he talked about bitterness. I am bitter.”

There was plenty of bitterness in the Meadowbrook neighborhood of New Haven, a modest-income, largely white and Republican suburb of Fort Wayne.

Tom Topp, 59, was walking with his granddaughter one April afternoon.

“There’s nobody to vote for me,” he says. “I voted once for Clinton, Bill, but not for these people. They all suck. Democrats are going to raise taxes, and Republicans got the world screwed up. I ain’t got a voice. I was a Democrat. I don’t even like the Democrats now. Obama, I hate, not because he’s black, but I don’t like his talk. I just want to stay out of it.” Pointing to his granddaughter, Topp concludes, “I’m worried about the future, if there’s going to be one.”

Although Robin Marcum, 52, says she usually doesn’t vote, the non-union auto-parts worker says she was planning to vote for Obama in the primary.

“It sounds like he’s leaning to overhauling NAFTA,” she says. “They slit our throats with that.” She’s most concerned about healthcare, education and jobs. “I would like national healthcare,” she says, noting that her health insurance premium at work quadrupled this year, even though her wages have been frozen at $12.15 an hour for four years. “If England and Canada can do it, why can’t we, even if we have to pay more for it?”

Just as many Democrats support Hillary because of her association with Bill and better economic times, Marcum is one of many Hoosiers who rejects her because of the ex-president’s record, especially on trade deals. “Obama says we’re living paycheck to paycheck,” she says. “A lot of us are. Something has to be done. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.”

Winning the support of white working-class voters will be a hard contest this fall. Unlike the prevailing sentiment before the Iowa caucuses that Democrats had many good choices, the mood in Indiana among many working-class whites seemed tepid toward all three remaining candidates.

Whither the working class?

Pundits have debated for years whether the white working class is becoming more conservative and, if so, if it’s because cultural issues are trumping economic issues. But the debate is often confused because there’s no agreement on how to define “working class.” The evidence shifts depending on whether analysts define working class as people without a college degree, people in the lower third (or two-thirds) of income or by occupation (which often leaves many service-sector jobs out of the working class).

Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels recently weighed in with his new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. He argues that since the 1950s, lower-income voters have remained more loyal to the Democrats than middle- and upper-income voters, and that most of the declining support from whites reflects the shift away from the Democratic “solid South” in the days of segregation. Republicans, by contrast, have gained mainly from middle- or upper-income voters, though many of those are modestly affluent voters who by other standards would be called working class (say, a household with a firefighter husband and nurse wife).

Bartels also argues that election surveys show that economic issues remain the most important for voters – especially for low-income voters – even though cultural issues have grown in importance (but notably faster for upper-income voters than for lower-income voters, contrary to popular views).

David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing in 1976. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy. He can be reached at [email protected]

I think one reason your dad and I were able to do it was there was less spinning of the government financial numbers. The dollar was worth a lot more then. I was self-employed and was paying my income taxes and Social Security (Self-employment Tax) quarterly. Now they pretend things are just fine Posted by whattheheck on 2008-05-15 10:40:09

Hi whattheheck,
The next President, if he's able to resolve any of the numerous ailments afflicting this country, will be demonized by the very people he's helping. In real life there is no "spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down", and congress needs to get behind well thought out long term solutions instead of the band-aid approach, the former being the awful, bad tasting medicine that's needed.
You said, "My 42-year-old son does the same job I did back then and is even worse off than average. I made the same annual pay in 1975 that he makes now and fed a family of four." I know I marvel now at how my dad supported a wife and six kids on a letter carriers salary, it would be damn near impossible for him to do that these days.Posted by theloneous on 2008-05-15 09:47:32

Hi Theloneous,
We'll get the pain due to the ballouts and protection of the mortgage crooks by the Fed, the Treasury Dept. and Congress. The huge increases are being passed on to us as the dollar is made to fall and the price of everything goes up.
I paid $3.95 a gallon for gas, but since I'm not working I'm not going anywhere. The people who are getting it stuck to them are those who must commute farther in order to get work and the cab drivers who can't raise their prices, but must buy gas or earn nothing.
Food costs are going higher and in some countries are in short supply. We can thank every administration since the mid 1970s. According to Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Sec. of Labor, a 35-year-old man now earns 12% less than one the same age in 1975 due to the falling value of the dollar.
My 42-year-old son does the same job I did back then and is even worse off than average. I made the same annual pay in 1975 that he makes now and fed a family of four. He is single and can hardly make it due to inflation, increased income taxes, Social Security tax and health care costs. His 1996 car needed work yesterday and it cost nearly $1400 Posted by whattheheck on 2008-05-14 13:25:26

Whoever the next President is he will have to inflict a lot of pain on Americans of every income class because the bush administrations are guilty of gross neglect of all its governmental responsibilities. Its time for America to pay up in order to get up to speed with the rest of the world. Its should be obvious to all now that 9/11 and the wars were/are diversions, while bush picked our pockets. Plus, while we looked the other way the world left us behind, Americans are like tourist lost in a unfamiliar world, vulnerable and broke. Bitter, confused? Yeah. But scared more than anything else.Posted by theloneous on 2008-05-14 09:23:58

Our current economic situation has developed over a period of decades and administrations. None of the candidates is adequately addressing our situation and may or may not truly be aware of just how dire it is.
Neither is this a "White Working Class" issue. White, Black, Blue Collar or White Collar Posted by whattheheck on 2008-05-14 09:01:38